


A Little, And Then All At Once

by Vestas_Kitchen



Category: History Boys - All Media Types
Genre: AU, M/M, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 15:32:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11970309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vestas_Kitchen/pseuds/Vestas_Kitchen
Summary: Tom Irwin grows up in a Sheffield town, but not at the time we're used too. This time, he grows up with another eight Cutler's boys.





	A Little, And Then All At Once

He’s four years old and Tom really, _really_ wants to go to school, because spending time in the kitchen all day with Aunty Mary is boring. His mum doesn’t want him to go just yet because he’s only just turned four with a birthday in August, but he cried and cried until she told him he was starting on the first of September.

Now he’s really wishing he’d waited.

Everyone, even the girls, is so much taller than him. All the boys are faster at running. The girls are too good at skipping for him to join in. He’s the only one to wear the enormous National Health glasses. The teachers say he has to go outside, and he just wants to read.

The older children are mean as well, and they laugh at him and give him the wrong directions to all the different places in the school, because he’s only little, and the school really does seem big. They giggle at his fringe which falls too long under his glasses and throw balls at him because they know he can’t catch them.

It’s only after Christmas when another boy comes in the class and sits right next to him. He’s just as short as Tom, and his hair is blonder and his shorts are even shorter, and he’s wearing a home-knitted vest.

“Hello,” he says, “I’m David. I like your glasses, can we be friends?”

David’s friends already with a boy in the other Reception class called Donald, because they live on the same street. Tom doesn’t really like Donald as much, but he’s still friends, but David, the boy who likes his glasses and speaks funny words in different languages and knows all the rude finger signs to show mean older boys, is his best friend.

* * *

  
Tom is ten years old and he’s just been told what he got on his Eleven-Plus. David was supposed to wait with him, but he got taken away to the first-aid room to get a wet paper towel after he and Donald fell out of the little tree at the back of the Juniors playground. Tom’s really glad that the meeting with the Headteacher didn’t take too long, because he doesn’t want to be late in the queue for lunch, because it’s mint green custard for afters today.

But he really wanted to go to grammar school. More than anything, really. David’s going and Donald’s going and so is one of the other boys in Don’s class, a boy called Antony who laughs a lot and is sometimes nice to him. He didn’t want to go the secondary modern, he’s cleverer than that.   

And he is; he’s just proved it. He’s going to go to Cutler’s with David and all the other clever boys, and learn about poetry and go on all the school trips (He sees the minibuses go out all the time! They must go everywhere.) and maybe even go to university. He’d be the first person in his family to do it, and he wants it to be special. They’d had a camping holiday in Oxford two years ago, they’d taken David with them as well and he knows that if he’s clever enough- and he is, he’s just gotten into grammar school- that’s where he wants them to go.

He finds David and Don in the hall, blue wet paper towels stuck to their foreheads, and tells them. David grins.

“See? I told you so. Nothing’d split the three of us up.”

Tom smiles at that, and stabs his custard with a spoon a little too excitedly. He’s just happy he’s still got his best friends.  
  


* * *

  
Tom is thirteen and doesn’t know what to think anymore.

Dakin, a boy who came from a different primary school has been a constant pain for the last three years. He takes time out of lessons to do football practice. He’s in the top set for PE. He manages to be clever without doing any work. He has this terrible ability to send every lesson on an irrelevant tangent.

And Tom doesn’t really mind it anymore.

He did at first. Dakin was a smarmy prick. He still is. But he’s still doing the same things, and Tom’s starting to really not care. In fact, it’s the opposite. He’s always waiting for Dakin to do _something_.

The others still irritate him. Lockwood’s still a massive knob. Rudge never has anything clever to say, plays sport, and still does better than Tom. Crowther always thinks he’s better than everyone else, and Tom knows he does because he never speaks to anyone.

David’s in a huff constantly now as well, because Don now splits his time between Dakin and them, though David’s sort-of friends with a boy in their form, Akthar, who Tom still guiltily refers to in his head as ‘replacement Scripps’. David might be the only person in Cutler’s who hates Dakin more than Tom used to do. He complains at him from the other side of the PE field where Dakin does hurdles and Tom and David field for second-base rounders.

“What a ponce.” David mutters, watching Dakin break a school record.

Tom nods and agrees, but notices that David looks a little bit too long as well.

 

* * *

  
Tom is nearly fifteen and knows why he doesn’t mind Dakin anymore.

There’s been a few words in his life that have been tossed around quite a few times, but now he knows which ones really apply. It’s not a revelation, but it is a very reluctant acceptance.

This little infatuation, because he doesn’t want to call it love just yet, has taken many forms. An attempt to take up football, which failed miserably. A mistake in taking Dakin’s advanced mathematics class, quickly dropped for Classic Civ. A laughable try at eschewing the horrid National Health glasses that have been the bane of his life since he was four, but without he looks like a bug-eyed, blind spider.

He suspects Dakin knows. He’s left Tom alone recently, after the football incident. He could just be growing up, if Dakin is capable of it, but if he knows, which is more likely, he hasn’t publicly said anything. It’s the least he could do, and as pathetic as it is, Tom appreciates the gesture.

It doesn’t mean he’s going to tell anyone himself. He has plenty more to lose than a boy’s pity. He’s going to take it, bury it, and hope that he doesn’t end up like Mr Hector who the older boys laugh about in the smoking toilets.

He doesn’t want to lose David, or Scripps, or Akthar either. Especially David, who still flinches at every word directed towards Tom, hiding being embarrassed, especially the one beginning with ‘q’.

* * *

  
He is sixteen, going on seventeen, and it’s the end of the exams. The last one, History, which he’s always been good at, and was a great combination of something he liked and something he was marginally better than Dakin in. He’s one of the last ones to turn in his O-Level textbook in Totty’s room, and he’s alone.

He knows he’s done well, and he’ll be coming back next year. David is, and Dakin is, and Scripps, and everyone else who ended up taking Mr Hector’s extra English Lit class. Most of the other boys are going on to courses at the sixth form college in the next town or starting their apprenticeships, but the select few are staying, the ones that are still welcome.

He’s going to go when he looks outside. Dakin and Lockwood have pulled off their shirts, and by the looks of it, have probably jumped in the canal to celebrate the end of exams. It’s a typical English summer day, so the sun is hidden under a layer of impenetrable white cloud, but it’s humid, and still too warm to really be wearing shirts and ties.

He’s stood there, transfixed, just staring out of the window, watching them. Dakin’s hair is flat for the first time since second year, and his skin is shining bright white and the back of his hair is sending little drops of water down his back. He doesn’t look cocky, or cheeky, or mocking, or pitying. He’s just laughing with his friend, and he is beautiful. It looks so honest, so sincere, and Tom wants nothing more in that single moment than to see that face more often, and just for him.

“Tom?”

That unbroken voice shocks Tom almost right off his table as he scrambles to face David, red-faced. David just looks at him, puzzled, textbook in hand. He places it in the red plastic box with the others, then sits next to him.

“What light through yonder window breaks?”

Tom can’t help himself, and after almost three years of bubbling, buried emotion, he laughs and he cries at the same time. David’s trying to be funny, but he’s seen what he was looking at. And that bloody quote, bloody Hector, all any of the lads have been doing for weeks is quoting. But now, right now, it just has to be the worst person at the worst time, and he’s left ugly laugh-crying at the side of not only his friend, but his best friend, who’s going to know now, because he can read a room, and Tom can tell that he isn’t going anywhere until he explains.

He doesn’t want to say it. He’s not sure he can. The words feel like weights on his tongue, and David could be the first to tell you that Tom and weights are mortal enemies. David’s not even looking at him, just staring out of the window at Dakin and Lockwood. He knows. He must know, but he’s still not allowed to go until he says it.

"Davy…” he starts, then instantly regrets it. He hasn’t called him Davy since primary school. David’s breath hitches, and the anticipation is knotting deep inside Tom in a dark and fearful place. “I think I might be homosexual.”

David doesn’t say anything, which might be worse than disgust or rejection. They’re just sat there, in silence in between sniffs, watching two totally oblivious boys run around the field. They can touch each other at the elbows with the slightest twitch, but the gap between them in those horrendous moments is miles wide as neither moves, waiting for the other to just _do something_.

David cracks first. He coughs, it’s still in the season for hayfever. He moves his hands to the table on either side of him, fingers curling underneath, gripping like he’s at risk of falling off. Tom’s hands stay where they are, playing with each individual finger nervously in no particular pattern.

He chokes, like he’s drowning on dry land, and the words come out to slow, practiced and too quiet.

"Me too, Tom."

Tom inhales quietly, and thinks at a million miles a second, and it makes sense. The looks at Dakin. The choir duets. The hatred of words thrown about by boys across the school, and it all fits.

David isn’t going to leave him alone.

"Are we going to be okay?"

That’s the question Tom’s been asking himself for months, in that terrifyingly vulnerable voice of his best friend, and all he can do right now is be honest, because he’s too shocked and too drained to lie. "I don’t know." And he is being honest. He doesn’t know and he hates it.

David leans into him so the sides of their arms touch, nothing more. "I hope we are. I really, really, hope so."   
  


* * *

  
Tom is almost eighteen and has just passed his A-levels.

Felix wants him to try for Oxford. Tom wants to try for Oxford. It’s all he’s ever wanted, Dakin aside, for his entire school career. He knows how he’d do it- he’d lie his arse off, say anything he could to get in those sacred halls of the ancient universities.

But although he’s clever, he’s not clever enough. The others are. Tom, really, has never had to work to be clever, he always has been. The others, even Dakin, have read books and made notes and struggled and learnt. Tom has three As and has never worked for them, it all came too easily. And now, he’s almost an adult, and he’s too old to learn how to learn.

And Tom’s had enough of being clever, for now. After four sad, long years of pining, maybe an extra four months of Dakin isn’t the best thing. He can leave Dakin to Totty and Fiona and Scripps and the new knobhead supply teacher, and Tom can go to Newcastle and be happy.

And it has nothing to do with the fact that David’s not trying, either.

* * *

  
Tom has known David for fourteen years and isn’t sure what to do anymore.

David’s parents are visiting family in Shropshire. The pair of them are sat together on a couch with doilies on the arms, surrounded by cardboard boxes, some Tom’s, some David’s, because the Posners car is enormous and there’s no way that Irwin had enough space for all the books. They’ve done this for years, waiting until the other’s parents are away and sneaking off to watch Top of the Pops together, leaning against each other with a blanket and hot tea and ginger biscuits, bitching over which song had managed to decimate Radio One for weeks.

But this time it’s a bit different.

In Tom’s mind, there has always been a sort of cognitive dissonance- being in this scenario, being happy, but taking David and imagining Dakin in his place. Not Dakin, per say, but Dakin-except-David, relaxed and in home-knitted vests and complaining about his inability to adjust the colour contrast of the TV.

But this time, he thinks Dakin, and he sees David anyway. He doesn’t want Dakin anymore, perhaps he’s been through enough withdrawal. It’s changed, and it’s not pleasant, but it’s not unpleasant either. It’s unnervingly comfortable.

David gets up from the couch to refill his mug, and Tom can’t help but watch him. Thank god David stopped wearing shorts after primary school because he’s not sure he would have been able to cope seeing his legs. He hums when he’s distracted, and plays with his hair absentmindedly. It occurs to Tom quite suddenly that this is a domesticity, a side of David that no-one else really sees. It’s just for him. It’s sincere.

It’s all he wanted from Dakin, and David gives it willingly.

And Tom might love him for it.

Tom’s smiling, he can’t help himself. He loves this. _He loves David_. And David notices.

“The last time I saw you staring like that, you were looking at Dakin.”

Tom reels back, fake-affronted. “How do you know how I looked at Dakin?”

“Are you joking? Our eyes met, looking at Dakin.”

Tom laughs down his nose as David brings himself back into the living room and snuggles back under the blanket that they always drag down from David’s bedroom. The topic of Dakin- a regular one between the two of them- goes ignored. It’s not unlike an English summer day three years ago, with two sad boys watching in a History room. There’s a conversation that’s going unspoken, tethered somewhere between fear and anticipation.

Tom wants to make the first move, and goes to take his glasses off. David notices, and stops him, reaching a cold, long-fingered hand over Tom’s. An old, half-forgotten memory shifts in Tom’s brain, of an eager, curious voice meeting another boy for the first time.

_ "I like your glasses, can we be friends?” _

It’s unbearably quiet and the trivial space between them is filled with so many feelings at once, and it’s impossible to pin down just one; there’s terror and wanting and awkwardness and softness and things and combinations that Tom doesn’t really have the words for. He can feel every thread where his hand lies on the blanket, every jittering movement of his heart in his chest, and each tentative, nervous twitch where David’s hand reaches over his own.

It feels like forever but it was perhaps less than a second, because David moves and then they’re kissing, and it is everything and nothing and all things in between. It’s unfocused and scared, still holding back a little, but everything else is so horrifically, messily wonderful because this is where they are and this is what they want and they have it. It’s vulnerable and safe and maybe, Tom thinks, this is all he’s really wanted since a cold January day fourteen years ago.

* * *

  
Tom is twenty-five and hates marking, because somehow grammar school children still don’t understand how to make an essay interesting. It ruins every single Saturday, when there are multiple other things Tom would really rather have been doing.

David yawns and shuffles away from his own stack of Shakespeare essays to pick up the post as it falls through the letterbox. Tom still isn’t sure how a man in his mid-twenties manages to pull off brown slippers and a striped dressing gown, but David manages it, barely. As he sorts through a pile of white envelopes, David comes across a letter of interest, and leans on Tom’s chair to read it.

“Letter from Don, love. Apparently, Dakin’s run off to New York with one of his history professors. A Mr Joseph Keith.”

Tom raises his eyebrows in surprise. The subject of Dakin stopped being awkward a long time ago, but that didn’t mean he they couldn’t still be interested. And it was interesting.

“Don’s not surprised, apparently. Oxford supposedly brought out a whole new side to Dakin.” David turns to one of the other pieces inside Scripp’s envelope. “Hey, look, this professor looks a bit like you, Tom.”

He leans the picture in front of Tom’s glasses, and Tom has to admit that there is a resemblance. They have the same hideous glasses, which he’s now come to appreciate. The professor also looks incredibly uncomfortable next to Dakin, who’s smirking at the camera, and sitting far too close to him than necessary. Scripps is on Dakin’s other side, which means that Akthar must have taken the picture, because it looks recent, and Rudge dropped out to start his business in second year.

David tuts, leaning his chin on the crown of Tom’s head. “Just think, Tom. If you’d only been a few years older, you could have been Mr Joseph Keith, galavanting over America with noted Sheffield playboy Stuart Dakin.”

He’s taking the piss and Tom can’t help but tease. Smirking, he quips back, “Can you imagine, me and Dakin?”

David snorts.“Only in my nightmares.”

Tom smacks him with a lackluster essay on post-war economic reform, and David pecks him on the cheek, grins, and goes to put the kettle on.

They’re going to be okay.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
